Hawks assistant coach Bryan Bailey: From South Side High to NBA bench

The coach in charge of trying to stop the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs was raised in a family of hardcore New York sports fans.

Atlanta Hawks assistant Bryan Bailey grew up in Hempstead and was a standout basketball and football player at South Side High School in Rockville Centre.

Though not a Knicks fan himself as a kid — he said he followed individual players instead of teams — the rest of his family was, and he has plenty of friends who still are. That, of course, has not dampened his drive to put together a game plan with the ultimate goal of knocking the Knicks out of the playoffs.

Hawks coach Quin Snyder has tasked Bailey with being the lead on the scouting team in this first-round series, and anyone looking at Atlanta’s bench during the Knicks' 113-102 win in Game 1 could see the passion he brings to that job.

Bailey bounced up and down from the bench almost as much as Snyder did during Game 1 as he worked to implement the offensive and defensive game plan  he was responsible for producing.

“You watch the game and see what he does,” Snyder said after the team’s practice on Sunday. “The best way to describe it during the course of the game would be game management. Substitutions, matchups, what plays we want to run. All those things that go on within a game. He took the lead role on scouting the team in this series. It really highlights his leadership capabilities.”

Bailey’s journey from Long Island high school star to trusted NBA assistant was both circuitous and far from conventional.

When he was a high school senior, Bailey and his younger brother, Maurice, became local legends by leading Nassau Class B champion South Side to an 83-79  victory over perennial Nassau Class A champion Hempstead for the  overall county title in 1998. Maurice had 25 points and Bryan added 23 in the championship game, totaling 18 of the Cyclones' 21 points in the fourth quarter.

Despite that, the only school to recruit Bailey out of high school was Stony Brook — which wanted him to play wide receiver.

‘I didn’t want to play football. Those guys were bigger and stronger than me,” Bailey recalled with a laugh in an interview with Newsday on Sunday. “I got an academic scholarship to Bucknell, and then I walked into the basketball office and introduced myself . . . I tried out and made the team.”

By his sophomore year, he was the starting point guard for Division I Bucknell, averaging a little more than 17 points both his junior and senior years. After graduation, he played 13 years in Europe on teams in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Bosnia, Cyprus and Italy.

“I had a chip on my shoulder,” Bailey, 45, said of his drive to succeed. “I was a walk-on in college. I didn’t get recruited. I had to prove myself everywhere I went. Even going to Europe, you have to grind and prove yourself.”

After he retired, he started a business with his brother training and developing young players. He was considering going back to school to get a business degree when he heard about an opening on the Knicks' G League staff in Westchester for the 2016-17 season.

After a year there on Mike Miller’s staff, he took a job with Utah's G League team. Two years later, he got his big break when Snyder, then the Jazz coach, added him to his NBA staff.

“I watched him on our G League staff and it became clear that he was a pretty good coach,” Snyder said. “He’s kind of the whole package. When you are talented and you work incredibly hard and have a great work ethic, it just stands out . . . He’s someone over the years I’ve come to rely on.”

When Snyder resigned from Utah and then took the Atlanta head job in February 2023, Bailey was one of the first people he brought with him.

One person not surprised by the success that Bailey has had working on the bench is Terrence Brown, who was his AAU coach on the Queens Cobras.

“Bryan was the stabilizer on our team,” Brown told Newsday. “He helped me manage all those egos on the team. You could see back then that he could be a coach.”

And now he’s a coach trying to knock off his hometown team at Madison Square Garden.

Bailey declined to share any intel about how the Hawks might try to even the series Monday night in Game 2 at the Garden. It’s clear, though, that he’s thrilled to be playing a major part in the game-planning.

Said Bailey: “Yes, the goal is to be a head coach one day, and you just kind of chip away. But my goal was to be in the NBA, and I never made the NBA.

"Was it a failure? No. I just want to be the best coach I can be and let the chips fall where they fall.”